Tuesday, 17 December 2013

290 roguelikes have qualified this year: this is only a slight increase of 7 roguelikes from last year and begs the question: 'Have we reached peak roguelike?'. More importantly, there's a significant difference in the included roguelikes as I have included all the 7DRL entries this year. I have not done this in previous years, so the figures could hide an actual drop in the total roguelikes released in 2013. However...

How did the games qualify?

The list was taken from the roguelike releases announced on the Rogue Basin news section between December 16th 2012 and December 16th 2013 and the 7DRL rogue likes that were rated by the challenge evaluation process. Unfortunately the list of Actively Developing Roguelikes is no longer maintained, so I instead included roguelikes listed on the last 6 months of posts on the roguelikes subreddit. This undoubtedly misses more rogue like releases than in previous years. I especially note that the Rogue Basin news section appears to be heavily biased against commercial releases - whereas the roguelikes subreddit is biased towards commercial releases so in summary it probably evens out. However, more eclectic releases will undoubtedly be missing from the list.If there is a roguelike you want to vote for which is not on the list, please post in the comments and I will include your votes in the final totals.

What about 'x'? Why isn't it on the list?

Make sure you announced your roguelike on Rogue Basin for next year.

What about 'y'? Why is it on the list?

As roguelikes become more popular, the term is used to increasingly describe a broader type of game. This list has expanded to embrace that idea, but mostly to ensure that we don't miss any actual roguelikes. With this many entries, I'd rather be inclusive rather than exclusive, as I cannot possibly play every entry. You are free to not vote for a game if you don't consider it a roguelike.

What's the prize?Pride. And a sexy logo - if you want one. You can see the winning 2007 logo on the Dwarf Fortress links page. Other winners are free to request them, but haven't done so. Logo designs for this year are welcome.

Having a competition is a dumb idea/offensive/stupid when you can't police the results.

Yep. Doesn't stop it being fun. You can vote for multiple different roguelikes. The idea here is that you will be encouraged to go out and download a roguelike that other people consider interesting, not that there is any kind of real competition element involved.

I would again suggest for next year to also browse at the very least the Announcements, and maybe the Early Dev, boards on Temple of the Roguelike when reckoning this fine poll---I and others try to mention all manner of things whenever possible.

However it is named, I am pretty sure Tome4 is still gonna blow everything else out of the water, especially as this poll coincides with its recent Steam release, and the great year of updates it had. Hoping that Adom gives it a run for its money (since it too had some nice updates), common - where are all the Adom fans?!?!

It's got an interesting mechanic in that a shadow constantly follows you from the left of the screen, so you have to constantly travel to the right. It also has some interesting online interactions (such as a designated daily seed where you can see the progress of others on the side of your screen) and progression of things that can carry over or be unlocked between runs (take a few key items with you, or unlock new classes and perks.) It kind of came out of nowhere and is unique despite some of its flaws. Worth checking out, IMO. :-)

I was introduced to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup by a friend, and I have to say it's the second best roguelike experience I've ever had (after Nethack). It updates frequently, has a broad range of play styles, and has built in measures against scumming of any sort, so all you do is play til you die (or succeed, but mostly its just til you die).

I like to ask, if there is a game, which does allow (but its not required) to play it with a permadeath, can it be considered a roguelike?I am speaking of Malevolence. I know it can't be in this pool, because its still not released, just in beta, but i like to know that.

Y'know I think there'd be less of the silly competition between the top titles if the results weren't visible before the end. Right now it's easy for vote-spamming to be encouraged.

In general I think a simple top 10 list (without ranking) is far more interesting than a top 1. The roguelike genre is too diverse to be able to say only 1 game deserves praise. If you compare with the 7DRL entries, though we end up with a top spot there is never any real distinction for the top-scoring game - all the good games get praised. Would be nice to see more of that atmosphere with this poll instead of "winner" and "runner-up".

In which way is Noxico an "erotic" roguelike? Is it in the way that every 1bit is as sexy as you can imagine, or is there some "impropriet" behavior? I didnt really played it just looked on some images.Seeing this game getting over 2800 votes in one days looks very suspicious.

Joseph: Well the thing is i don't play ASCII RL games they are too much confusing for me, i see it only as an blend mix of letters. I know that's a heresy, but tile based ones are ok for me :D

Anyone know where to download Lambda Rogue: The Book of Stars? The official page is probably selled to some japanese or chinese fashion butique and only links i can find are on softonic and i dont want to download anything from there. Thanks for any help

Well, it's a tricky situation since there looks to be obvious vote-rigging from ADOM and ToME fans too. If you remove Noxico should you remove them?

Anyway, I think Noxico needs to be removed as the poll just looks like a complete farce otherwise. If you do that then a polite apology e-mail to the developer would be necessary, and a mention in the poll results posts. I think next year the whole poll needs a bit of a rethink if you want it taken seriously.

Andrew! Cheers for sticking to the idea that "[people cheating in the poll] doesn't stop it being fun." Maybe the wisest course of action, considering last year's flamewars and how, as Darren pointed out, we can only assume games like ADOM and ToME have the occational multiple voter, ahem. This poll continues to be one of my personal December highlights, the very embodiment of the holiday spirits, actually :)

Darren, why is Noxico the farce and TOME4 and ADOM the legit ones?A: You have no evidence other than suggesting "it is inPAWsible" for it to have that many votes.B: The furry community online may in fact be several orders larger than the roguelike community, in which case a rally by them could easily be legit.C: And what about all the people who just want anything BUT TOME4 to win, or want to see new IP's in the mix. Last year, the top 10 rogulikes included what, 1, maybe 2 new IP's? Should things be disqualified if they are a new IP? Seems like new blood and new ideas in the mix is the very thing roguelikes need, or they will be no different than CoD year in and year out.I have told 10 people about noxico being in 1st, and 8 of them, looked it up, didn't like it, and then voted for it anyways because it isn't tome4.

Really, I think what needs to happen is to have a select panel of a few nominate what games are to be included in the voting.

It is somewhat silly to vote on over 50 roguelikes and makes it unwieldy to even look at the list of candidates. Have a panel select ~20 candidates from the best contenders put forth by the community and then have those 20 entries be voted on.

As for voting oversight, I am not sure what you can do about duplicate voting and spamming and such, but it is obvious there needs to be a bit more regulation.

Unfortunately this poll has become a joke. Shall I make AliensRL win this year, just to prove it? I can still make it :P

But not to be a naysayer - here's one solution -- a google form instead, where you enter an email, and at least a 200 character reasoning why you think your nominee will win. And of course, the e-mail needs to be validated. This solution can still be gamed, but noone in the RL community would want to invest that much effort to do it.

Or **at least** an IP-locked vote platform.

I'd offer to implement it myself, but can't do it the next year, cause the RL of the year 2014 will be Jupiter Hell, so people would say I cheated :P

For those people who think this poll is a joke and are making serious alternative suggestions, please be aware that people have opening discussed using VPN tunneling to mask IPs when voting for this poll in previous years, and describe how your alternative voting system would block this.

Then go read the last two sentences of the post that I have made every year when announcing the poll, and have a long think about what that means, and what a popularity contest in an artist medium actual entails.

Then watch this, not because of any kind of message, but because it is a kick ass song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUPYIShaX1s

"This isn't about how 5000 people like one game more than anything else. This is about how one person liked a game more than anything else that 4999 people ignored."

That's a good aim, but it is lost in the static I believe. There are just too many entries to sift through and find that one game that everyone else ignored.

I was reading through the Reddit thread for this year's poll and someone offered a great suggestion about limiting the participating roguelikes to games that have only released in the last year.

It would stop the poll from being a popularity contest (yay ToME, yea, we already know) to being the place to discover the best new roguelikes. Of course popularity would still play a part, but it would be somewhat diminished with little known and new games competing rather than mainstays like ToME and ADOM.

So instead of ToME 4 and ADOM going rounds this year, it would be something more like One Way Heroics and Dungeonmans going at it.

It would definitely make things much more interesting and much more fun to discover new games, rather than wading through a dense list of entries.

Stephen: The poll is only roguelikes released this year. What I think you mean is roguelikes only first released this year. That is a lot harder to measure especially in this day and age of early access, and I'd end up complicating the selection process immeasurably.

For the curious, I just tweeted the current Google Analytics referral stats for the last 30 days. Take them with a grain of salt.

I think being able to choose your pet, almost-unknown roguelike is the best thing about this poll, I wouldn't want to see it go away.

Vote spamming can be alleviated by requiring an email to confirm votes or a Facebook registration. Of course it's still not exactly rocket science to game that, but at least it should take some more work.

The poll is great for finding out about those little games that get 10-100 votes each. The top few are boring, everyone knows aboutnthem already.

That's why I say don't declare a winner. People have become too obsessed with first place when it's the 20th place guys that really count. This poll should be "Roguelike Highlights of the Year" rather than "Roguelike of the Year".

I still think that a Review New Roguelikes Month would be more fun than a poll. Rather than reformulating what would be basically my comment from the request for votes of last year, I'll just quote that comment here:

> I have a suggestion, based on the idea that, as you said, the point of the> poll is to encourage "to go out and download a roguelike that other people> consider interesting, not that there is any kind of real competition element> involved". From next year on, instead of a doing the poll, start a blog-fest:> propose the list of roguelikes and invite people to try a roguelike they have> not played before, write a post about their experience and send you the link> of the post, within an established period (a month, let's say); at the end,> you make a summary post with all the links. The linked posts could be from> blogs, but also from a thread created for the occasion in a roguelike forum.> This way, we get to celebrate the roguelike world and discover and enjoy new> games, avoiding a lot of negativity and bitterness.

Maybe also put a Random Roguelike Generator which people can use to get the name of a roguelike to try out. Since the number of forum threads may become overwhelming, you could ask that each forum which joins the roguelike-blog-fest sends you just a single link of a summary thread, which contains the links to the other relevant threads in the forum.

Darkgod - I dunno...I reckon suddenly deciding not to award anyone is sending the wrong message. As much as I wanted your game to win, I now think Noxico SHOULD win - not only because of pure numbers and the burden of proof, but also to spur some interesting discussion in the next RLR episode about the nature of open polls and the competitiveness of the community.

Darren's "lets not post a winner" is certainly an option in the future, but doing it this year and only after the game he worked on fell out of first place seems rather spiteful. That would be like setting the rules because he didn't like the result.

Also, "'Promotion of this poll from within a game itself is strongly discouraged and will be sanctioned if discovered. This includes using any kind of MotD or in game chat functionality which may already exist in the game.'" obviously andrew didn't go through with this, but for games not acting in spirit with the contest, you can't beat TOME4 for directly going against a request made by the poll's creator.

I'm all for the part of Kornel's suggestion from last year that all previous winners be removed from eligability.

Darren's "lets not post a winner" is certainly an option in the future, but doing it this year and only after the game he worked on fell out of first place seems rather spiteful. That would be like setting the rules because he didn't like the result.

Also, "'Promotion of this poll from within a game itself is strongly discouraged and will be sanctioned if discovered. This includes using any kind of MotD or in game chat functionality which may already exist in the game.'" obviously andrew didn't go through with this, but for games not acting in spirit with the contest, you can't beat TOME4 for directly going against a request made by the poll's creator.

I'm all for the part of Kornel's suggestion from last year that all previous winners be removed from eligability.

I agree with your attitude here Andrew. People take this thing so seriously I bet it can ruin it for you, stress you out. This is your hobby, not your job, hobbies should be fun, rewarding, stimulating, not a huge chore.

And all of these people telling you to change things can do their own polls however they want to. I'll vote in those one's too.

Mr. OpenId... I don't recall seeing the ad for this in-game (not this year anyhow), and on tome website the advertising was kept to a minimum (it was much more explicit on ADOM website). In any case, I think Andrew should remove the 2ndary poll (as some people seem to take that even more seriously than the first one - check ADOM site).

The poll was always as much of a joke as it is this year, it's just that this year the results have highlighted the fact. One couldn't for example claim that this year's result somehow doesn't count, but the results from previous years do.

The poll was always as much of a joke as it is this year, it's just that this year the results have highlighted the fact. One couldn't for example claim that this year's result somehow doesn't count, but the results from previous years do.

The voting is completely bi-modal anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem. Visitors have an option to knock out games that got more than 75% of the winning tally, and kaboom, ADOM, ToME and Noxico are gone.

Those that care about spiking their number still get first place, those that care about hearing about a cool new game just getting off the ground skip the noise and check out the best of the rest.

Sweet fancy moses! I honestly just now highlit the voting numbers. Those 3 games took 85% of all votes.

Forget what I said about 75% of #1, anything with more than 5% of the total should be filterable if the vote stuffing is that bad. A sixth grader could code that up over recess.

And it would keep the 'guys who just don't get the spirit of the thing' away from the people getting bent out of shape about ballot stuffing on a blogger poll dedicated to games most people never even heard of anyway.

I'm a big fan of Rogue Likes, but I feel like this list is a bit unmanageable. In the future would it be possible to split them up in a tournament style where groups of 10 or so are voted on at a time and then move on to the next tier or something similar? This list doesn't seem very user friendly in my opinion.